Babies, Blogs, and Pretense

My wife loves to peruse lifestyle blogger sites. I mean, seriously, she follows at least forty mommy bloggers and always seems to go to the same ones every day. I don’t have a specific interest in them in any way really, but I like to observe her as she looks at them. I like to notice the things she is looking for when she is looking at a new blog she has never looked at before. She notices the layout, the pictures, and the babies. Of course, the babies.

If these things don’t fit the bill of a “top” blog, then she will just exit the page and continue scrolling her Instagram account for the ones that she is more familiar with. What constitutes a top blog? It is the one with a cute headline, a cute baby, a cute blogger, cute toenails, a cute layout, and cute pictures of food. Are you getting the trend? Everything is cute. And while I am not trying to knock either my wife’s love for lifestyle bloggers, or the bloggers themselves, they always make me think about the ways in which we advertise ourselves.

Social media is weird phenomenon isn’t it? Nobody takes pictures of the parts of themselves that they don’t like. The pictures in our blogs are only the pictures that looked cute right before we got into that huge argument with our significant other whom we ignored the rest of the day. The “social” in media does little to connect us. Much of our relational desires go unmet primarily because what goes on the internet is not who I am but a small reflection of myself. To some degree, we are always experiencing fragmentation in our lives but should make conscious efforts to look at the world as a whole rather than see only the small, good parts that people want us to see. This works conversely for us as well. We should live lives as authentic beings, not as Jean-Paul Sartre saw fit, but as people who can showcase authentic expressions of themselves toward one another.

Again, this post is not a diatribe against the internet or social media (I’m looking at you Jonathan Franzen), but simply a call to experience both beauty and brokenness in the world. No one has or lives a perfect life, and what truly connects us is the reality that we are thrown into a messy world, and that one day, hopefully, it will be made right.

Christopher is a writer based in Miami — for now. He is obsessed with all things sports, culture, politics, and Seinfeld. He has a B.A. in English from Florida International University and constantly ponders why he took all of those religion and philosophy classes instead of doing something useful, like coding. When he is not writing fiction in between work hours, he longs for days that he can write for a living. His favorite things to do is spend time with his wife watching Mad Men, reading, and having a good drink.